Paper weights

by Anna Marie Murphy

Two days before the pre-exam reading period in December, as the campus grew quieter and students turned to wearing comfort clothes and became more solitary, Liz Stapleton ’07 sat herself in a round copper cage of her own making in the lobby of McElroy during the lunchtime rush. She was there partly to complete a class project (fellow students in the fine arts course “Hot Off the Shelf” would be photographing the event as performance art) and partly to provide a service. “Write down what you fear or what pressures you, and drop the piece of paper in the cage,” she told students passing by—it will help to “take away the strain.”

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Stapleton came to the idea while constructing the piece as part of an independent study in sculpture. Having entered her senior year, as she explained in a companion paper, it seemed that “people [were] constantly asking me what I was going to do with a major in studio art. . . . The choice to make art my major turned my artwork into a cage or prison, surrounding and pressuring me. Thus the idea for Caged In.”

Of the students in McElroy, Stapleton reports, the women tended to be more interested in “the concept” of the cage, while men wanted to talk about “how it was constructed” (of eight-gauge copper wire curved into rings and lashed together—soldering proved unreliable—with a thinner, 18-gauge wire). In the span of an hour and a half, 65 students gave Stapleton slips of paper. “No one will love me” or “I’ll be alone in life,” wrote eight. “Exams,” “finals,” or “grades,” cited six. Five wrote “failure,” or “FAILURE.” Four said “the future,” and four were more specific, writing “failing to get into [graduate] school,” whether law or architecture or named programs at named institutions. Two feared not getting a job after college. And then there were these:

I’m afraid to let people down

to work without guarantee of fruitful products

not getting my work done

lack of time

that I’ll die and it will end

fear that war and injustice will only get worse in our lifetime

monsters under the bed

being in the dark

perfection

paralysis

humiliation

my papers will be disastrous and way off track, Eeek!

girls at this school

fear of being fat

fitting in

friends

I’m afraid that I’ll be alone for Christmas Break

relationships

fear of acceptance

rejection

confusion

boyfriend

butterflies

instability

losing my mind

people I love dying

I fear for finals, monsters, & cheese

I fear not being satisfied and happy with what I choose to do in the future